About Me — Colleen Sheehy Orme

I have always been motivated by love

I call myself a southern New Yorker much to the dismay of my true Nu Yawker buddies. I blame it on my native Brooklyn parents and a large Irish brood that makes The Big Apple home.

I am also a declared Jersey girl despite the protests of my Sea Isle sisters. I claim sixteen summers at The Shore and homeownership as my defense. It was beach-going and partying while wearing what I call my ‘out of state’ clothes lest I be the Harper Valley PTA mom.

Thankfully, anything goes in Jersey.

But I was born and raised outside of Washington, D.C., in Northern Virginia.

I grew up running through fields, hopping on horses, and jumping in creeks. It was a blissfully rural anomaly close to the city.

I am the youngest of five, with an intense loyalty to my strong single mother.

I never once felt slighted by the absence of my father. Quite the contrary, I was grateful to have one parent who loved me enough for two.

My siblings sustain me. Though my brother might say we girls, can spar like The Real Housewives. It felt unnatural to leave those four walls of origin and divide and conquer.

We are that kinda close.

With an itsy-bitsy dose of a self-respecting Irish drama sprinkled on top.

At seventeen, I found myself in the town of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which prior to The Office, nary a soul could envision. I was held up there while I pursued my B.S. in Business.

My mom thought being a writer was like being a starving actor.

She was kinda right.

She encouraged a last-minute change of major. She worried I might end up having to support a family as she did. Moms! Always a step ahead of us, aren’t they?

I met a tall, charming, hunk of handsome there, but it didn’t last.

I like to say I broke up with my husband.

Divorce is such an ugly word.

He took me financially but I retained our greatest assets. My boys are everything good in this world — kind, funny, smart, generous, thoughtful, sweet, and handsome. They are far better versions of me.

Thankfully, kids have a way of outsmarting us like that.

If you’re looking for me, there’s no place else I’d rather be, than with the three greatest loves of my life.

I tried hard but couldn’t keep their family together. I fought the grief but ultimately my spirituality allowed me to embrace it. That and a heavy dose of marriage counseling for one.

I made many mistakes trying to resuscitate love.

I tell my boys to ‘use the best of me and lose the rest of me.’

Ever since I was little, words were begging to be let out of me.

I scribbled in my Mickey Mouse diary, wrote pen pal letters, and scrawled in composition notebooks. In between, I got lost in books. I was a terrible grade school student on account of being a talker — those pesky words.

The nuns wrote notes on my report cards.

“Colleen is a sweet girl but she talks too much.”

“Colleen is a lovely girl but she talks too much.”

“Colleen is a beautiful girl but she talks too much.”

Somewhere around the fifth grade, they ran out of pleasant descriptors and just wrote I talked too much. But I did excel at one thing — Reading. I got placed in the Junior Great Books Program.

I felt like a giant every time they called my name and pulled me out of class.

I strode a little taller on those days.

I am a foundational girl.

I believe in God, family, and friends. In the kinda values that make you do the right thing when no one is watching. Because Irish Catholic mommas make you think they always are.

My passions are writing and marketing but they’re not where I derive my sense of self. That comes from stopping to help an elderly person with their groceries or paying for the person in front of me whose card was declined.

I am from a long line of first responders who taught me the word stranger doesn’t exist.

I try to live my day to day with kindness and respect.

But I’m human so this is cumulatively speaking, not saintly.

The intersection of my worlds, marketing, and writing is not so different.

They share commonalities and revolve around emotion, connection, and relationships. In both fields, you must have the ability to see beyond the obvious and connect the dots.

I am a marketing/PR/Digital Strategy consultant, a freelance journalist, a national relationship columnist with Beliefnet, and a former business columnist.

I am a dreamer, a happy girl whose mom said she was born with Joie de Vivre.

But I allowed another person to take this from me.

I didn’t lose a relationship, I lost my being.

The best parts of me. The ones that not only others liked, but I liked. I became less than. I couldn’t detect the danger hiding within someone until it damaged me.

I share these epiphanies of love.

The emotional nuances I romanced through my own pain and through the eyes of a marketer meet relationships.

I am a southern New Yorker, a wannabe Jersey girl, a Virginia is for Lover's sweetheart and a D.C. metropolitan country gal.

A woman whose relationship defied the luck of the Irish.

I’d love to say I’ve given people’s ears a rest, and that I’m no longer much of a talker. But those who know me wouldn’t just protest this claim they would all-out riot.

I have been and always will be motivated by love.

Because I was taught by the very best.

I’m a happy girl who resurrected herself. #womanresurrected

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